Craft Beer Crosscut 11.15.18: A Flight of Mixtape

When it comes to brewing beer, music is a natural accompaniment. Brewing is not unlike any other art form in the world. The brewing artist has to get into a certain mood to attack the project at hand with the mindset of ending up with a masterpiece on the other side. And music is the perfect catalyst to set the tone for the day and make these artistic visions a reality. In fact, as brewers work tirelessly brewing their next beer nearly 100 percent of the time, the sounds of music waft through the air as thick as the smell of fresh new brew. In the same way that many of history’s most beloved songs have come to life as the result of beer drinking, there’s a platinum-selling collection of beers inspired by — and, often, named after — a song, album or band. Peaks and Pints presents a beer flight today inspired by music that we call Craft Beer Crosscut 11.15.18: A Flight of Mixtape.

Craft Beer Crosscut 11.15.18: A Flight of Mixtape

Abita Purple Haze

4.2% ABV, 13 IBU

You’re making music, but you aren’t tripping, so that new ditto looper pedal you bought on eBay just isn’t working how you thought it would. No worries; there’s a solution for that, and it’s Abita Brewing‘s Purple Haze, named after Jimi Hendrix’s song. An American wheat with pureed raspberries, it’s light and a more universally legal version of the taboo alternative. Your ditto looper may still sound a bit off and colors may appear all to realistic, but not hallucinating has its upsides, too. Now, excuse us why we kiss the sky.

Silver City MxPx Best Life IPA

6.2% ABV

Bremerton punk legends MxPx have been playing with a dangerously youthful hysteria for 27 years. Guitarist Yuri Ruley and drummer Tom Wisniewski are a tight combination of pulsing notes and solid beats, and Mike Herrera’s undulating bass line and strenuous vocals is the funky, nasty glue keeping it all together. Distinctly left coast, MxPx is music for youth on the fringes of conformity. In January 2017, Silver City Brewery and MxPx brewed a California common “Secret Weapon,” named after the band’s 2007 hit of the same name. The beginning of this month, the two entities collaborated again, this time brewing the hazy IPA, MxPx Best Life. The unfiltered IPA takes on a lightly tropical, juicy, Left-Coast hop character with a malt bill incorporating flaked wheat, fermented with the brewery’s specialized “haze” yeast.

Belching Beaver Swerve City IPA

6.5% ABV, 30 IBU

Belching Beaver Brewery’s latest collaboration with Deftones is a smooth and juicy New England-style IPA. Being as big of fans of the style as we are, the band was looking for something loaded with citrus notes. Belching Beaver powered-up this 8-bit hazy brew with Nelson, Galaxy, Mosaic and Citra, then added Simcoe Cryo hops for that extra hop bob-bomb. This hazy POG craft beer hit the nose with juicy orange, peach and pineapple, which also happens to be the taste profile.

Belching Beaver Phantom Bride IPA

7.1% ABV, 55 IBU

Chino Moreno, lead singer of alt-metal band Deftones, is a hophead. When Moreno isn’t screaming “I watched you change into a fly!” he’s drinking craft beer. A longtime fan of artisan beer — and IPAs in particular — Moreno requests local ales at every stop along his band’s tours. San Diego brewery Belching Beaver got word of Moreno’s drinking passion offering the Sacramento band a collaboration opportunity to brew Phantom Bride IPA, a single off the band’s recent album, Gore. Moreno chose the Mosaic, Amarillo, Simcoe and Citra hops that went into this hoppy, West Coast style IPA. The crushable, super fruity IPA offers orange, citrus, pine, grapefruit and peach flavors with a moderately low bitterness.

GoodLife G. Love’s Special Sauce

7% ABV, 70 IBU

In 1994, Philadelphia-based blues/hip-hop artist G. Love scored his biggest mainstream hit with “Cold Beverage.” His band, G. Love & Special Sauce has been touring pretty much nonstop ever since. Last June, that included a set on the lawn at the Bend brewery. That, in turn, led to GoodLife Brewing‘s latest collaboration between the brewery and G. Love himself, to make what the brewery calls “the dankest of the dankest IPAs known to mankind.” G. Love’s Special Sauce IPA combines six different types of hops — Mosaic, Idaho 7, Mandarina Bavaria, Centennial, Columbus and El Dorado — for a danky dankster of a beer.